Originalism, The Death Penalty, and The Perfect Poison

The decision in Baze v. Rees set off much discussion (stemming from Justice Stevens' concurrence) as to whether the death penalty can be ruled unconstitutional. The major argument against is that the constitution clearly contemplates the use of the death penalty at several points -- most notably the due process clauses ("No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...."). Given this rather clear affirmation that the state can (after satisfying due process concerns) take away a person's life, is there any room for the an abolitionist claim?

To explore this issue, I offer up a fantastical historical scenario which I nonetheless think might illuminate how context is critical, even in seemingly clear textual cases. It is the story of the Perfect Poison:

* * *

When European settlers first began to arrive in America, they discovered a bounty of new flora and fauna, wildlife and crops, that were rare or non-existent back in their homelands. One of the most intriguing of these was a small, clover like plant that grew wild in the forested expanses of the east. Local Native Americans used it as euthanasia for their dying elders, or warriors mortally wounded in battle, for, when mashed into a paste and ingested, it had the effect of immediately and painlessly causing death. Observers who saw the plant being administered marveled at how -- in contrast to the bloody spectacle of beheadings or the slow struggle for air during a hanging -- men and women who were fed the clover simply seemed to drift off to sleep, without struggle or apparent distress. Dubbed "American Hemlock", the plant was colloquially known simply as "the perfect poison."

Seeking to distinguish themselves from their more backwards European forebearers, American colonists rapidly began utilizing the perfect poison as their sole method of execution. This is not to say there was no debate over the morality of the death penalty. Quakers and other abolitionists argued strongly that the state had no right to claim a human life, as part of their generic opposition to non-violence. When America achieved independence and the constitution was being drafted, this debate grew in salience dramatically. When the due process clause was drafted to include the potential for capital punishment, progressives reformers attempted to make a stand and strip the word "life" from the text.

The debate was fierce, instigated primarily by a few true believers on each side. Knowing that their "objective" critique of capital punishment was unlikely to sway undecided delegates, abolitionists pointed to the excesses of the French Revolution and tried to emphasize the risk of brutal, undignified killing at the hands of the state. The "spirit of '76" made the delegates very receptive to the inherent human dignity possessed by all individuals, even criminals. But advocates of the death penalty responded by pointing to the perfect poison. America already had nearly 100 years of experience with this drug, and thus reliably knew that they could apply the ultimate punishment while still maintaining the dignity of the criminal. They pointed out that if, by some chance, the national government wished to abandon the perfect poison, it would run afoul of the just-completed clause prohibiting "cruel and unusual" punishment (what would later be the 8th amendment). The risks the abolitionists claimed were confined to old Europe. Americans had developed their own method of execution, that was quick, painless, and immediately lethal.

As the debate progressed, it became clear that the existence and use of the perfect poison was going to be the decisive factor. Delegates who had come in undecided were gradually won over to the pro-death penalty side. The abolitionist's arguments were abstract and unpersuasive given the existence and universal usage of the perfect poison. "Were we still in England, and capital punishment meant sickening hangings (with many more savage citizens clamoring for the return of burning at stake!), I would not hesitate to ban it," proclaimed one delegate from New Jersey. "Where the culture is one of barbarism, where the norms of the enlightenment have not penetrated, the penalty of death is too dangerous to lie in the hands of man. But, God blessed America with an excellent herb, one which evades all the traps of savagery, and our people in their infinite wisdom have taken to use it. It is always possible that our people will regress or thirst for more blood, I admit. But I believe that, given the choice between civilization and the abyss, our people will choose the former."

And so it was that the constitution passed explicitly contemplating the use of the death penalty in America.

Unfortunately, what was not foreseen by the Representative from New Jersey, nor any of the other delegates at the Convention, was the rapidity by which Americans would settle their new country. American Hemlock, as mentioned, grew only in the leafy expanses of the eastern forests, and was resistant to cultivation. It was also highly sensitive to human encroachment. As these woods were cut down to make room for new farms and homesteads, the perfect poison became harder and harder to find. At the same time, its demand was skyrocketing, leading to over-harvesting. By the mid-18th century, the plant was only rarely seen. In response to this scarcity, governors began authorizing the alternative forms of execution that had repelled the framers: hanging and firing squads. But even with this shift in policy, habitat loss had doomed American Hemlock. By 1890, it was declared extinct.

* * *

The point of this story is to illustrate how contemporary context can matter, even to an originalist or textualist. The framers sanctioned the use of the death penalty within the specific context of the availability of the perfect poison. Not contemplating the modern problem of ecological collapse, the founders did not envision the potential for these circumstances to change. But, without the perfect poison, it would seem clear that, at the very least, the question of whether the death penalty was constitutionally sanctioned was open again, notwithstanding constitutional text that contemplates its use.

Now, obviously, this story is extreme. Most obviously, there was no perfect poison, nor is there any proof that American colonists would have used or preferred even if there was. Also importantly, the story creates a scenario where the necessary trigger for permitting the death penalty physically disappeared from the planet. I am not arguing that the actual process of deliberation over the death penalty even closely approximated this.

Nonetheless, I think this story is conceptually illustrative. For one, at the very least I think it demonstrates that changes in context can theoretically alter what is and is not sanctioned by constitutional clauses, even under a very strict form of originalism. And I think it demonstrates that point more broadly that might be apparent at first glance. The framers in this story were making decisions about broad principles based upon what -- in retrospect -- we can see to be temporally-specific assumptions. Here, the assumptions were laid out explicitly (in the debate, anyway -- the drafted text did not anywhere specifically demand that life only be taken by the perfect poison), and the change in circumstances was dramatic. But in general, I think it's obvious that when people engage in deliberation they work from within the only conceptual framework available to them -- that is, their own place, time, and vantage point -- and make decisions that are contingent on those assumptions. As Iris Marion Young points out, "in political communication our goal is not to arrive at some generalities .... Instead, we are looking for just solutions to particular problems in a particular social context" [Inclusion and Democracy (Cambridge: Oxford UP 2000), 113]. Everyone deliberates that way, utilizing assumptions (usually unstated) drawn from the world around us that -- like the world itself -- can and often do change in the future.

The standard "originalist" (or perhaps "classical originalist", since I think the debate here is still largely intra-mural) response here would be to say that the constitution accounts for changing circumstances through the amendment process, nothing more. But I think the perfect poison story demonstrates why this is too thin a response. The existence of the perfect poison -- assumed to be permanent but really contextual -- was an embedded assumption laid into the text as originally deliberated and drafted. It would seem foolish to take from that ratification debate the principle that the death penalty absent the perfect poison is consistent with the mutually agreed upon principles that came out of the ratification debate, because that's clearly not what had been agreed upon. Rather, any debate about the current constitutionality of the death penalty would have to closely examine the relevant context and assumptions under which it was passed (including assumptions about justice and human dignity) to see whether they still hold up in the present day. If, for example, the founders ratified the use of the death penalty based on a conception of human dignity that is now "extinct", is that any different than ratifying the use of the death penalty based on the availability of a "perfect poison" that is now extinct? I don't know. But it's an interesting question to ask.

"Down To Earth Day"

Did the Family Research Council just come out against Earth Day? Yes, yes, they did:

Today isn't just another reminder to use recycled paper or drive energy-efficient cars. It's a calculated attack on the sanctity of human life.

Okay....

Boxing Blogging: 4/23/08

What a nice Wednesday Night Fights! Four fights, four knockouts (more of what I expected last week, to be honest), including one that is in contention for knockout of the year. Even the "Ringside Remembers" sequence was nice -- I didn't know Evander Holyfield literally fought through a heart attack in his loss to Michael Moorer. Just good quality entertainment all around.

Joe Greene (19-0, 14 KOs) TKO9 Joshua Okine (18-4-1, 12 KOs)

How many disadvantages did Okine face coming into this bout? Let us count the ways:

1) He took the fight on four days notice.

2) He's really a welterweight, fighting against a big middleweight.

3) Joe Greene is a bona fide prospect at middleweight.

4) Greene's far faster and more athletic than Okine.

Yeah, that's a tough gig. Okine showed toughness and heart, but was eventually overwhelmed. He was knocked down twice in the 9th before the referee stepped in. The stoppage was a little questionable, because Okine was still throwing back, but he was trapped against the ropes and too tough to quit, so I can't really complain. The second knockdown, incidentally, was a thing of beauty -- but was to be overshadowed at the end of the day.

Greene continues his progression, although a win with that many built in advantages doesn't tell that much. Okine needs to get back down to fights with people his size -- he'll get eaten alive by people who can take his punches, and he has no power at middleweight. Also, he needs to stop smothering himself on the inside. But he has heart and some okay defensive moves -- at least enough to enable him to make a respectable living in the sport.

Wilmer Vasquez (6-0, 4 KOs) TKO3 Rodney Wallace (4-1, 4 KOs)

Isn't this what makes heavyweights great? Wallace was outweighed by 70 pounds and had a 6 inch height deficit, and it was noticeable. Vasquez had a swagger to his step that told everyone he knew he could hammer Wallace into submission (potentially explaining his otherwise baffling lack of a jab). And that's what happened. Wallace tried to stick and move, and had some success at it, but he inevitably got caught and then Vasquez took over. You can't question Wallace's heart -- he was caught clean loads of times and never went down, but you can question whether or not a 5'9" guy should be competing at heavyweight. Eventually, Wallace's corner threw in the towel, and Vasquez picked up a TKO victory.

Juan Urango (20-1-1, 16 KOs) KO4 Carlos Vilches (53-8-2, 31 KOs)

Wow, what a hook. What a hook. I didn't think anything would top Edison Miranda's show-stopper KO of David Banks, but this certainly came close. Vilches was out cold before he hit the ground, and now falls to 1-5 in his trips to the United States.

This was a title eliminator for Paulie Malignaggi's belt, a fight which probably won't occur for awhile given that the Magic Man has at least two more fights ahead of him before he thinks about a mandatory. But Urango certainly earned the fight with this highlight reel knockout. Urango's a slow, plodding pressure fighter who can crack, which makes for an interesting style contrast with the light-hitting, fleet-footed Malignaggi.

Anyway, this shot should be showing up on YouTube soon, and is worth your time. Welcome back into title contention, Juan Urango.

David Estrada (22-4, 13 KOs) KO2 Alexander Pacheco (14-6-1, 12 KOs)

Estrada is an all-action slugger who's tons of fun to watch. His war with Kermit Cintron is a classic, and sadly descriptive of Estrada's career -- tough and gritty, but ultimately falling short against A-level opposition.

Fortunately, Pacheco is not A-level opposition. Not only is a he a bit chinny, but he was willing to stand with Estrada and trade, giving us an entertaining scrap for what little it lasted. Estrada was credited with three knockdowns, though only the last was all that legitimate. The first was really bogus -- Pacheco was literally thrown to the ground. The second Pacheco held onto the ropes for support, but it didn't look like he'd have gone down had they not been there -- the litmus test for whether a ref can rule a knockdown in that situation. The final one was a crisp shot that laid Pacheco flat on his back. He couldn't beat the 10 count, and Estrada earns a KO victory.

Movement and Stillness

Last week, a close friend of mine published an article in the Carleton Progressive about Barack Obama -- a small portion of which dealt with his position on Israel/Palestine. The thesis of the article is that Obama doesn't have the stones to really go to the mat for progressive principles. With regards to Israel/Palestine, he contrasted Obama's famous remark that "nobody is suffering more than the Palestinians, to his more recent demand that the UN unequivocally condemn rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip as evidence of selling out progressivism in favor of...what? Zionism I guess, though I hate it when these are considered to be in opposition.

But I have to say, I find that whole argumentative sequence bizarre. I've noted before that I -- resolute Zionist that I am -- have no serious problem with the "nobody is suffering more" statement. People are acting as though Obama was claiming that the Palestinians are objectively worse than Darfuri Africans. But Obama was speaking in the context of a) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and b) failures of leadership -- nobody suffers more than the Palestinians from the failures of their own leadership. And that's true (as was quipped, the Palestinian leadership "never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity"). Tragically, I can't say that nobody would be so rabidly anti-Israel as to think that Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is worse than the Sudan's treatment of the denizens of Darfur, because that appears to perfectly characterize the UN (more on them in a minute). But it's clearly not Obama's position.

So, the original statement -- supposedly proof of Obama's bold progressive independence from the clutches of The Israel Lobby (or whatever) -- is perfectly consistent in my mind with mainstream pro-Israel politics and practice. Then, we move to the betrayal: Obama's demand that the UN unequivocally condemn rocket attacks coming out of Gaza.

Knowing my friend, the problem here isn't (I don't think) that the rocket attacks are not important or condemnable. Rather, I suspect his concern is that Obama didn't nod strongly enough towards the suffering of the Gazans. But anyone who even casually observes the UN knows that their problem is not that they're insufficiently attentive to the plight of the Palestinians. The UN is perfectly able and willing to launch an infinite amount of fusillades regarding the horrific Israelis and their bloody imperialist wars of domination. What's missing is any substantive counter-weight -- that Israelis are suffering too, that Palestinian terrorism is a significant issue, a (if not the) primary obstacle to the peace process, and utterly unjustifiable to boot (as opposed to "resisting the occupation"). Criticizing a speaker for being insufficiently worried about Palestinians getting their due account in UN resolutions is like criticizing the NAACP for not showing enough concern about White people's rights in 1935 Mississippi. That isn't the problem -- Jim Crow Mississippi didn't due anything else but concern itself with the rights of White people.

I remember once being in a practice debate round in which the other team ran a plan by which the US would become more "balanced" in its voting on UN resolutions concerning Israel. "More balanced" was left incredibly vague, but I noted that the US already has a well-delineated criteria, the Negroponte Doctrine, determining whether we will support a given UN resolution regarding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (this was in July of 2002):

For any resolution to go forward, the United States — which has a veto in the 15-nation council — would want it to have the following four elements:

* A strong and explicit condemnation of all terrorism and incitement to terrorism;
* A condemnation by name of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, groups that have claimed responsibility for suicide attacks on Israel;
* An appeal to all parties for a political settlement of the crisis;
* A demand for improvement of the security situation as a condition for any call for a withdrawal of Israeli armed forces to positions they held before the September 2000 start of the al-Aqsa intifada Palestinian uprising in which 1,467 Palestinians and 564 Israelis have died.

Precisely which of those four elements is an unreasonable demand for inclusion? But yet, they consistently fail to be met, so the US consistently vetoes SC resolutions. It is extraordinarily depressing to me that this is considered some sort of capitulation away from progressivism.

So getting back to the original point: Obama really hasn't moved at all. There is no tension between noting that Palestinians suffer greatly in the I/P conflict, particularly from being constantly betrayed by their leadership, and demanding that the UN take a time-out from single-minded blasting of Israel to remember that Jewish lives matter too. Both are crucial insights that all progressive parties need to keep in mind when viewing this conflict.

Preventative Care

Opinio Juris has a guest-post by Israeli academic Elihu Richter, who makes a case for adopting a "precautionary principle" in favor of punishing those who incite to genocide.

The proposal to indict the President of Iran for incitement to commit genocide is the template case study for applying the Precautionary Principle based on "predict and prevent" as opposed to "proof of intent after the event".

It is my premise that the core of a program for prevention of genocide and genocidal terror should be based on applying public health models for prediction and prevention which specify surveillance, prevention and control of early genocidal conditions and proactive interventions keyed to early predictors. Based on the lessons of the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur, and many other genocides, it is clear that state sponsored incitement and hate language are highly specific early warning signs that should be the trip points for preventive legal action, instead of waiting for prosecution after genocide is over.

Text, subcontext, and context. The foregoing is the basis for some statements I would like to make about text, subtext, and context. The text is the threats--some claim they are merely predictions--to wipe Israel off the map as part of this decision. The subtext is the pictures of missiles below which phrases such as these threats appear. The context is the enriching of uranium in violation of UN resolutions, developing ever more advanced missile systems, promoting Holocaust denial, and supporting terror groups with explicitly stated genocidal agendas, and the fact that the President of the country carrying out such enrichment, is the most vocal advocate of these genocidal threats.

Subtext and context, I submit, are critically important. Up to Oct. 25 2005, Ahmadinejad's predecessors were quoted as having made many threats similar to those made by Ahmadinejad. These were ignored by the International legal community. Had these "inchoate" statements triggered some kind of punitive action, would we be where we are now? Re context, I would be willing to bet that Ahmadinejad--and many others--had made many similar statements on all kinds of soapboxes when he was a minor politician unknown to the world. The case for action to prevent an imminent peril emerged from the day he became President, acquired real power, his statements about wiping Israel off the map became headlines everywhere, and his government rejected all UN resolutions concerning Iran's nuclear plans.

Lapsed period between the statements and the actions. I believe the discussion of the lapsed period has to take into account the fact that children are those most vulnerable to the effects of incitement and hate language from official state sponsored sources, such as texts, media, and places of worship, and the effects may be decades later. We know that for adults, where there is an authoritarian environment, incitement can convert normal people into sadistic killers over a matter of months. But children are the most vulnerable group, as is the case for so many toxic exposures in medicine, and incitement and hate language reaching children increases the likelihood of intergenerational transmission of the effects. As with all cause-effect relationships in which the relations between exposure and effect may be years or decades (e.g. Asbestos, cigarette smoking and cancer, or DES in mothers and congenital malformations in their offspring), we cannot dismiss the case for legal action and accountability just because there is a long lapsed period between exposure and effect. Where the audience for incitement includes schoolchildren, even if there are no immediate effects, we have an obligation to apply R2P-the responsibility to protect future generations-to ensure R4L-Respect for Life.

In a sense, this is pie-in-the-sky. The international community will take no substantive action against Iran and its leadership for genocidal rhetoric towards Israel so long as it remains just rhetoric and not action. Of course, as Prof. Richter eludes to, intent becomes moot after the event, so we're really just rolling the dice and hoping (a rather common trope when it comes to the fates of vulnerable minorities -- Jews and otherwise). But Prof. Richter I think at least establishes the grounds by which we could take substantive action.

I Could Not Be Happy In Rural America

Tyler Cowen hates America. Do you?

Esq. sympathizes, no doubt.

Moving the Line

Politico has an article up about that ever-present question hovering over the Obama campaign: how many votes will he lose because of the racism factor (the same thing, I feel, applies to Clinton with sexism, but let's focus on Obama for now). Steve Benen also contributes to the discussion.

As far as I can see, most of the talk about the impact racism might have on an Obama candidacy is centered around the "hard-core" racist -- that is, those people who simply would not vote for a Black man, no matter what. Maybe I'm too much of an optimist, but that's not really what worries me. I don't think it's a significant part of the population, and I suspect it's concentrated amongst people who weren't voting Democratic anyway, in areas which Democrats weren't going to win anyway.

The bigger issue, I think, is on the more subtle effects of racism -- the one's that don't manifest themselves so dramatically as a categorical refusal to vote for a Black person. Rather, the more damaging element of racism is that how it might warp the perception of voters of all backgrounds, making them less amenable to Obama's overall message. In America, it is extraordinarily difficult to escape being influenced by at least some racist tropes -- at least at the unconscious level. This is true regardless of one's political alignment, class background, or even (ironically enough) race. But because much of how most people evaluate their political choices relies on a complex and volatile mix of policy preference, instinct, gut feeling, and social pressure, these subconscious cues can play an out-sized role.

Imagine a typical liberal Democrat. She agrees with Obama on most issues, but a few things about him make her a bit uncomfortable. She's not a big of Jeremiah Wright, and wonders if Obama has more Black Nationalist sympathies than he's letting on. She worries about the message his admitted youthful drug use sends to her kids. But ultimately, these concerns pale against the amount of political commonality she has with Obama compared to McCain, so she relatively easily makes the decision to vote for the Illinois Senator.

Now, switch to a more "swing" voter. He is not as lined up with Obama on the issues as the rank-and-file Democrat, though he still shares more with him than he does McCain. But it's a closer call, and for him, those nagging gut instincts (Is he really prepared? How do we know he's not a militant? He's friends with too many rap stars for my liking...) play a bigger role. They could push him over that line that divides between a vote for Obama and a vote for McCain.

This man is not a "hard core racist" by any stretch. If a Black candidate ran that was in line with his views, he'd easily vote for him over McCain, just like our liberal Democrat did. But the confluence of racial factors makes it a harder sell -- it makes it more likely that the marginal voter will end up swinging towards the GOP whereas he might vote for a White Democratic candidate substantively identical to Obama. Those little pushes that racism gives in one direction or another -- those are I think the bigger concern in the 21st century; more so than the standard, easily identified, and easily remedied Klansman form.

So Much on So Little

I have to say, I am thrilled that Pennsylvania is finally voting. It seems like an age since the last primary or caucus, and the press has already shown it has the attention span of a three-year old and that without the immediate specter of horse races to analyze or polls to parse, it will mindlessly pursue the first shiny object that catches its attention. So, if only for giving us a temporary respite from questions like "Is Rev. Jeremiah Wright as patriotic as Barack Obama?" (wtf?), thank you Pennsylvania.

That being said, this is a totally meaningless primary. There is no likely outcome which could seriously change the dynamics of the race.

Let's break it down. Barring something cataclysmic, Clinton cannot win the Democratic primary. She is expected to win Pennsylvania solidly, but the models all have incorporated that prediction and it isn't enough. A huge win -- say, 25 points -- might qualify as cataclysmic, but that's not going to happen. On the reverse side, while most people consider anything less than a 7-point win for Clinton to be a mortal wound to her campaign, she's not going to withdraw after winning Pennsylvania, so even a narrow victory won't push her out. Obama would have to score an exceedingly improbable upset (or maybe lose by just 1 or 2 points) for there to be any hope of Clinton exiting the race.

In absence of those two exceedingly unlikely scenario, the state of the Democratic race will be the exact same tomorrow as it was yesterday: Clinton remains in with only a negligible shot to win. Never has so much been said about a race with such little import.

But He Didn't Reject AND Denounce The Idea

Speaking on The Daily Show, Barack Obama denied that he was planning to "enslave the white race": "That is not our plan, Jon, but I think your paranoia might make you suitable as a debate moderator."

I dunno. That's just not a strong enough denunciation for me. I think "the American people" still have "questions" about it. Perhaps we can dedicate a whole week of news coverage to asking whether Obama is a closet slave-master?

Facebook and Sex

Phoebe Maltz links to a Gawker post claiming that the new "Facebook chat" will rapidly become the fastest way to get laid in college.

Pshaw, I say. The intelligent among us already knew how to use Facebook for the effortless score.

But We're Elites! We Know Everything!

In the wake of the Barack Obama "bitter" controversy, specifically the stunning revelation that it did not actually hurt him in the Pennsylvania polls, Daniel Drezner offers multiple potential reasons for the discrepancy between what the media elite said would happen and, well, reality:

A) Gun-toting, small-town Jesus-worshippers are so bitter that they don't watch cable news outlets;

B) Gun-toting, small-town Jesus-worshippers are so bitter that they aren't likely to show up as "likely voters" in a poll;

C) Gun-toting, small-town Jesus-worshippers are so bitter that their phone service has been cut off;

D) Gun-toting, small-town Jesus-worshippers are so bitter that they dislike Hillary Clinton even more than Barack Obama;

E) The commentariat is elitist and out of touch with what engages gun-toting, small-town Jesus-worshippers.

I always thought the most elitist act in this whole ordeal was a bunch of beltway strategists essentially demanding to rural Pennsylvanians: "You will vote on this, peasants!"

Other Issues

Commenting on a report that several House members are introducing a resolution opposing the college bowl system, Michael D of Balloon Juice explodes:

Having solved Social Security, poverty, the War in Iraq, SCHIP, tax reform, Medicare, illegal wiretapping, and other such trivial issues, some lawmakers have latched onto an issue that will, no doubt, positively affect the lives and living conditions of millions of Americans.

Can we declare a moratorium on these sorts of posts? As hard as it is to believe sometimes, nobody in Congress has forgotten the war in Iraq. And introducing this resolution is not what's blocking Congress from reforming health care. If the Representatives had not introduced this bill and instead devoted themselves 100% full time to debating Iraq, the net effect in terms of practical movement on that issue would be nil.

Look, I can understand one thinking that this resolution is wrong, or even that it is not the sort of issue Congress should get involved in. In other words, attacks on the merits. But there is no time of year where one couldn't wax indignant about the amount of serious issues Congress isn't dealing with to satisfaction; and that really can't be a bar to Congress spending time deliberating over the many smaller issues that still potentially should be debated in the public arena. Indeed, so long as it isn't actively interfering with the big stuff (and again, the College Bowl Resolution is not what's stopping Congress from passing S-CHIP), I actually kind of like it when lawmakers buckle down to solve some lower-profile problems that won't necessarily give them prime-time billing on the talk show circuit.

Cosby Conservatism

Anyone who liked my series of post on Black Conservatism will undoubtedly enjoy this article from The Atlantic situating Bill Cosby in the same tradition.

Matt Yglesias accurately says the long article is tough to summarize in excerpts, and also pulls out the reason conservatives have trouble recognizing their philosophical affinity with the movement:

The aspect of the tradition that says African-Americans will need to solve their own problems has enormous appeal to most moderate and conservative whites. But the tradition's analysis of why that's the case -- that America is a fundamentally racist society -- is viewed with horror by those some moderate and conservative whites.

And indeed, in the article it is pointed out that there are plenty of culturally conservative Blacks who vote Democratic "not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels -- in fact, he knows -- that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him."

Anyway, it's a good read, and well worth your time.

Boxing Blogging 4/20/08: Wednesday & Saturday Blogging!

Of all the boxing this week, I saw both more and less than normal, on account of Passover and visiting Chicago. On the one hand, it meant I missed Friday Night Fights on ESPN2 (Airport) and Bell/Adamek (Seder). On the other hand, I did get to see Hopkins/Calzaghe after the Seder was over, which I wouldn't otherwise have been able to, along with (most of) the online webcast of Henry/Diaconu, and of course "Wednesday" Night Fights (in quotes because the endless Red Sox/Yankees game pushed it well into Thursday).

Wednesday

Chazz Witherspoon (23-0, 15 KOs) UD10 Domonic Jenkins (13-8-1, 6 KOs

Honestly, I don't remember enough about this fight to give good commentary. I do remember that I thought Witherspoon won cleanly, after an early spurt where Jenkins looked like he might have tried to make a go of it. I also remember Teddy Atlas telling us that if Witherspoon really wants to be considered a prospect, he had to knock out Jenkins (which several other fellow prospects had done in Jenkins' 7 previous losses). Eh. A knockout is nice, and it's not like Jenkins has a granite chin, but I thought Witherspoon looked fine this outing. 15 KOs aside, he doesn't really have that much pop in his fists. He's a boxer. Now, how far will boxing skill take him against a higher caliber than Jenkins? We'll see.

Peter "Kid Chocolate" Quillin (18-0, 14 KOs) UD10 Antwun Echols (31-8-4, 27 KOs)

Now, this was a fight where I really wanted to see a knockout. Echols is a three-time title challenger who is at the end of the rope. Since 2004, he is 0-3-3 (all, it should be said, against reasonably solid opposition) with one loss by knockout. I saw him in his fight immediately previous to this one, against untested prospect Michael Walker after Allan Green bailed last minute. A confluence of factors: Echols' veteran savvy, Walker stepping up for the first time, Walker taking the fight on very short notice -- all led to Echols escaping with a draw. But anyone who saw the fight could see his legs were not there. Had he been in with a power puncher like Green, he would have been destroyed.

And Quillin has a reputation as a power puncher. So I told my friends: "this one is going to end by KO -- possibly a career-ending KO." Wrong by me. To be clear, Quillin absolutely dominated this fight from start to finish. But he displayed no killer instinct when he had Echols hurt. Sure, the older fighter exhibited some solid survival techniques, but he was not being pressured in any meaningful sense. Though the biggest win of Quillin's career, it was somewhat of a disappointing outing, and I hope he shows more aggression next time out.

As for Echols, he looks done. Certainly he needs to stop taking fights against young punchers like Quillin and Green, as they are fights Echols cannot win. The last thing to go in a fighter is power, and Echols still has it. But he doesn't have the legs to stand and trade with a guy with dynamite fists, which takes away his only winning option. It didn't happen tonight, but if keeps up signing for these sort of fights, Echols is going to get seriously hurt.

Saturday

Adrian Diaconu (25-0, 15 KOs) UD12 Chris Henry (21-1, 17 KOs)

This fight was webcast by Donkingtv.com, after a relatively successful experiment doing the same with the Spinks/Phillips title fight in St. Louis. Unfortunately, the feed cut out in the middle of the 10th round in what was a competitive and exciting fight, leaving us assorted fans in the dark as to the outcome. While this was disappointing (as one person said, "why doesn't this happen at Cory Spinks fights?"), these sorts of things happen with new technology, and I remain glad we got to see the fight at all.

Anyway. Going into the tenth I had it 5 rounds to 4 for Diaconu, but he seemed to be fading. Since I have no idea how those last few rounds actually played out, I can't comment on the decision. What I can say is that both guys looked good, and I particularly liked Diaconu's adjustments after Henry really dominated the first round. I'd seen Diaconu once before annihilating Rico Hoye in his only other major fight, so I knew he could smoke guys, but this time he also showed he had some ring smarts.

On the bad side for Diaconu, the aforementioned fading late was worrisome. More dangerously, he eats uppercuts like they're delicious, delicious candy. That something Henry was able to exploit throughout the fight, particularly when nothing else was working, and kept the fight close even when Diaconu seemed on the cusp of pulling away.

Rumor is Diaconu might fight Glen Johnson next, which would be a stellar fight and one I think Johnson could win (but an excellent learning experience for Diaconu). As for Henry, he was pretty unknown coming into this fight, and losing rarely helps careers. But he didn't look out of his league or anything, so a few bounce-back fights and he could put himself back on the map of contenders.

Joe Calzaghe (45-0, 32 KOs) SD12 Bernard Hopkins (48-5-1, 32 KOs)

The more I watch boxing, the more I'm realizing I have my own perspective on fights that not every other observer shares. I care a lot more about quality of punches over quantity -- I'm likely to reward even a couple clean hard punches over a lot of pitty-pat work. And I gather that some people share this view, and others don't, which is the why Calzaghe/Hopkins decision is causing such heated debate. On the one hand, SC of BLH thinks anyone who scored the fight for Hopkins is crazy. Well, I guess Dan Rafael is crazy. And I, too, saw it for Hopkins -- albeit very close with many tight rounds. The distinguishing factor is that even though Calzaghe was landing more, Hopkins was landing effectively, and that swings me as a judge more than flashy aggression.

None of this is to take away from Calzaghe's victory. After being firmly out-fought in the first three rounds by The Executioner (including a first-round knockdown that seemed to embarrass him more than hurt him), he was able to substantially turn the fight in his favor -- picking up the tempo and pressuring Hopkins far more than the 43 year old enjoyed. Hopkins is not an easy man to even bend to your will in the ring, and that Calzaghe was able to do that at all is a tremendous accomplishment. Even insofar as we debate what actually happened during that long low blow break (I think Hopkins was simply smart enough to know that, hey, he's 43 and getting a free rest. Why wouldn't he take it? It's not like he cares about fan reaction normally), it's clear that Calzaghe did manage to get inside Hopkins' head, and that might have been his greatest weapon.

But still. A lot of Calzaghe's flurries felt like shoe-shine work to me, and shoe-shining looks a lot more damaging than it is. By contrast, when Hopkins landed his counter right (including the beautiful one that caused the knockdown), it did damage. Inside, Hopkins knows just how to work inside a clinch to actually land punches that hurt. And while it's true that Calzaghe did manage to push Hopkins out of his element, let's not forget he also wasn't exactly showing Miguel Cotto levels of focus (his father basically had to smack him when he started complaining in the corner about Hopkins' "cheating". Not that I disagree -- the generous way to describe Hopkins is a "cagey veteran", or perhaps "it ain't cheating if you don't get caught").

So, in my mind, Hopkins still has not been convincingly beaten. That's not saying this decision was highway robbery or anything like that. Only that, as is so often the case in Hopkins fights, the scorecards are arguable. Calzaghe won that argument where it mattered.

Oh, and one more thing that might betray my total amateur status in terms of boxing strategy. It seems to me that, when Calzaghe goes into one of his furious flailing combination bits, he'd be vulnerable to the uppercut, no? I mean, those punches look wide to me, and if one can overcome the sheer speed of it all, you'd think a fighter could sit down on a good uppercut and catch Joe Cool clean. No?

Maryland Reverses Hideous Rape Ruling

Thank God: The Maryland Court of Appeals (Maryland's highest court) has unanimously reversed a lower court ruling which held that a woman could not withdraw consent once penetration had occurred. The argument was that the common law held only the "deflowering" to be the crime in rape, so once that had occurred the damage was done. As a proud Marylander, it was extremely embarrassing to be associated with that sort of logic, and I'm glad it's been officially overruled.

Via Feministe

UPDATE: As I wrote in the other post, I stake no claim as to whether this case, on its facts (the defendant claims he withdrew five seconds after consent was withdrawn -- I don't know if that account is disputed by the victim), should have yielded a conviction. But as a point of law, the principle that rape cannot happen once penetration has been achieved is atrocious and rightfully has been overruled. Appellate courts rule on matters of law, not fact, and the legal point at issue here clearly needed to be reversed.

Out to Lunch

And then some. I'm leaving early tomorrow morning to visit the University of Chicago. I then fly out of Chicago that night to come home for Passover. I won't be back at Carleton until Sunday afternoon, and, since I'm not bringing my computer along, I'll be mostly out of contact.

Have a good weekend, and to my Jewish readers, a good seder.

Eight Year Old Yemeni Girl Sues Over Forced Marriage

An eight-year old girl from Yemen went to court after being forced into marriage with a 30-year old man. Under Yemeni law, she was too young to prosecute a case, but upon hearing her complain the presiding judge ordered the arrest of both her "husband" and her father.

“My father beat me and told me that I must marry this man, and if I did not, I would be raped and no law and no sheikh in this country would help me. I refused but I couldn’t stop the marriage,” Nojoud Nasser told the Yemen Times. “I asked and begged my mother, father, and aunt to help me to get divorced. They answered, ‘We can do nothing. If you want you can go to court by yourself.’ So this is what I have done,” she said.

Nasser said that she was exposed to sexual abuse and domestic violence by her husband. “He used to do bad things to me, and I had no idea as to what a marriage is. I would run from one room to another in order to escape, but in the end he would catch me and beat me and then continued to do what he wanted. I cried so much but no one listened to me. One day I ran away from him and came to the court and talked to them.”

“Whenever I wanted to play in the yard he beat me and asked me to go to the bedroom with him. This lasted for two months," added Nasser. "He was too tough with me, and whenever I asked him for mercy, he beat me and slapped me and then used me. I just want to have a respectful life and divorce him.”

I debated for a long time over how to write up this post. My first instinct was applaud the girl for being a total bad-ass in this situation. But that felt inappropriate. She demonstrated tremendous courage, no doubt about it. But the fact remains she never should have been put in this situation in the first place. It is far too much to ask of an eight year old, to have to go to court to win her freedom from sexual slavery. She is clearly an extraordinary girl, and she has more than earned her "respectful life" (not that such a thing needs to be earned). Hopefully, her case can serve as a spark point to aid other girls, similarly situated, who do not possess super-human courage and cannot escape on their own.

Talkin' Sophisticated

There's a new study being reported claiming that there is a positive correlation between candidates who use "sophisticated" language and the amount of support they get from highly educated voters. This effect apparently operates independent of the substantive policy dimensions of the speaker's rhetoric.

Matt Yglesias, observing that less-educated voters weren't turned off by complex rhetoric (they just don't exhibit the positive effect as strongly), thinks that there's no downside to quoting Aeschylus in the stump speech.

Ideally, perhaps, but I think we might be forgetting the lessons of the "bitter" fiasco. The less-educated voters in the study might not intrinsically care about the type of rhetoric their candidate's use. But then, I doubt the study authors subjected them to a follow-up barrage of media coverage screeching about how out of touch the candidate is ("Greek playwrights? Ewwwww!!!!"). The media is perfectly happy crafting its own narrative about how they assume less-educated voters "will" respond to these sorts of things, and then you get weeks of coverage about how Barack Obama is an elitist who is loathed by everyone outside metropolitan San Francisco.

Clean Government in The Congo

I have an unexplained interest in The (D.R.) Congo, of which I've blogged on before. Blessed (or cursed) with fabulous mineral wealth, there are few places in the world that deserve piece more than the Western Europe sized nation. Under Belgian rule, it endured one of the most brutal colonizations in Africa (not an easy title to win), followed by systematic plundering by the Mobutu Sese Seko, and then a horrific civil war that claimed the lives of millions.

But, under the leadership of Joseph Kabila, the country has just completed its first fair and open election. And the Washington Post reports that reforms are -- slowly and fitfully -- beginning to set in. A new rule posits that 40% of all governmental revenue shall flow outward to state legislatures (though the money has yet to arrive). Bureaucracies are slowly coming together and starting to work. And local lawmakers are beginning to put together reform packages -- and are worried about being voted out of office if they don't deliver.

The other day, 60 of the 102 salaried lawmakers showed up for a session that began about an hour late.

They were supposed to hear a report about the country's corrupt customs office, but that was postponed because the report was not yet typed. They were supposed to go over the details of a new property tax system, but that was also postponed, because the property tax expert was not around to explain.

The president of the assembly, Gabriel Kyungu wa Kumwanza, seemed frustrated, but for a reason that has never really existed in Congo: fear of not being reelected.

"The people of Katanga, they are pressuring me!" he said, rapping his gavel on the podium. "They want to see change, but they see I am only growing fat!"

Something else was notable about the session, which was broadcast on state TV: On a sunny Saturday afternoon, a couple of dozen people showed up to observe their government in action, and not all of them were the lawmakers' drivers.

They included a Congolese human rights activist, a few miners and Boniface Mbuya, a 28-year-old law student who regularly attends because, he said, "maybe someday I'll be a great man." He was getting used to the new system, he said, and was still trying to shake off a profound sense of repression and an almost cult-like reverence for the powerful.

Though the provincial governor recently installed a suggestion box outside the assembly, for instance, Mbuya said he hasn't used it yet.

"I always have this ambition to write something and drop it inside," he said. "But maybe the government would say, 'Oh, these students, look at what they've written.' I fear it." Still, he supported the new constitution, voted in the 2006 elections and said that he expected his representatives to deliver.
[...]
Attempting to satisfy the rising expectations since the 2006 elections, the governor of Katanga, Moise Katumbi -- who presides over an area the size of France -- has made several symbolic gestures.

Though he has no official power to do so, he decreed a new minimum wage of $150 a month. He bought several ambulances and hearses with his own money. He levied new property taxes, planted roses at the airport and painted downtown shops in shades of salmon.

It's that last part that makes me smile. Is it symbolic? Yes. But it's symbolic of change. It's symbolic of a government that feels it needs to show something to its people. And its symbolic of a society that -- after so many years of darkness -- may finally see hope for a better future.

Never Give Up, Never Surrender

The Corner is worried that President Bush is about to submit to an "unconditional surrender" on Global Warming (I swear I'm not making that rhetoric up). I haven't heard that appellation used since history books about the Japanese and WWII. But I guess since the consequences of planet-wide climate devastation would make Hiroshima look like a brush-fire, maybe it's about time we get over our "honor" and admit the reality that's staring us in the eye?

Via Balloon Juice

The Legal Implications of Loads of Litigation

The US Supreme Court just handed down Baze v. Rees, a highly fractured 7-2 opinion allowing execution by lethal injection.

My view on capital punishment lies roughly opposite of Feddie's: I don't have any intrinsic, moral objection to the death penalty, but I long since have become convinced that the death penalty system in America is so damaged as to make it virtually beyond repair -- up to and surpassing Justice Stewart's description of it being "wanton and freakish." Consequently, I think as applied it runs afoul of constitutional due process and cruel and unusual punishment protections, and I am not optimistic about the ability of policymakers to find a remedy. On the sub-question of whether lethal injection particularly is impermissible (the subject of this case), I stake no claim: that is a fact-based question about the reliability and pain quotient of the procedure upon which I do not have the relevant information.

But that's not actually what I want to talk about. Rather, it appears (from SCOTUSblog's summary, which I have no reason to doubt -- but I haven't read the opinion itself) that Justice Thomas' concurrence (joined by Scalia) rendered an attack on the plurality claiming that the standard their ruling would lay out would lead to an excess of litigation, potentially grinding the death penalty machinery to a stand-still. My question is why this is a legally relevant consideration?

Now on one level, that answer is easy for a legal pragmatist such as myself -- I don't think any consideration, particularly as to outcomes, is per se irrelevant (though some are far more relevant than others). But for the more...metaphysically minded judges, I admit to some confusion about where trying to insure that death comes quickly to our enemies (to borrow from Morbo) becomes a constitutional principle which can affect and even change our criminal justice protections? To my mind, it seems like -- even from the position that the death penalty is theoretically constitutional -- there is nothing flowing from there that proves that the due process and cruel and unusual punishment hurdles our system has to overcome might be high -- perhaps inordinately high.

Psychologically, this is related to what I termed the philosophy of the limit, the need some people have that there be concrete and solid limitations on the contours of justice, because the alternative means a potentially endless struggle for the ideal. Scalia and Thomas would not, I presume, disagree that the constitutional protections for due process, or against cruel and unusual punishment, act against our ability to implement the death penalty in some way. At the same time, they also believe that "ideally", the death penalty is consistent with these protections. What they can't accept, however, is that practically speaking the hurdles these protections put up may be extremely high -- they may require copious amounts of litigation to resolve, they may demand intense fact-sensitive adjudication and multiple layers of appeal. And that might make the death penalty so hard to implement that it becomes effectively impossible. They can't accept that, so they construct their legal schematics so their limits lie comfortably within that which will allow the machinery of death to proceed smoothly.

Given the constraints of Scalia and Thomas' putative ideology, that is not a legitimate "constitutional" leap. It is a legitimate leap for a pragmatist -- but both Thomas and Scalia loathe pragmatism. So I remain confused. Where does the justification for that sort of reasoning come from?

Breathing Life

There was just one more thing I wanted to follow up on with regards to my S-V-S post. I had asked whether or not The Apostate had used the critical language in her post ("erase", "lived experience", "silenced") sarcastically or not. I could certainly see it, though what I was hoping for was ironic. In my comments, she told me she was "half-sarcastic."

This matters to me because, as I said, I do not want the tools and rhetoric I value so much to be seen as an adversary, as an enemy, to those who need it. But of course, often they are. The question is, can they be reclaimed?

Post-modernists will tell you that every narrative, every tale, contains within it the seeds of its own destruction -- or at least subversion. In The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Patricia Williams wrote:

To say that blacks never believed in rights is true. Yet it is also true that backs believed in them so much and so hard that we gave them life where there was none before; we held onto them, put the hope of them into our wombs, mothered them and not the notion of them.

On the one hand, the language of law has for much of American history been the enemy of Blacks, and the rhetoric of rights mocking. Nobody, more so than African-Americans, would have more justification to be cynical about law's capacity for justice, or the ability of "rights" to protect.

But Blacks did not abandon rights. They did not abandon the language that had tormented them for so long. They clung to it harder. They squeezed rights so hard that they breathed life into what was a hitherto dead concept. Rights talk, even though it was for so long a hollow hope, also had a kernel of hope contained into that Blacks grasped onto and made into something real.

Likewise, I believe that within the critical concepts The Apostate uses -- the demand for space and recognition, the protest against privilege and presumption, the refusal to be erased to fit some master narrative -- there is a spark of truth. It is a spark that we cannot cede if we want to be truly free. The only reason the enlistment of these terms feels so mocking, I dare say, is because of that spark. Because even though they represent our truth and our needs and our very lives, they often as not are found on the other side from ourselves. And that hurts.

Pure Blood

An outlet called Israel Insider is breathlessly telling us that *gasp* Obama's preacher, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is an ex-Muslim! Indeed, they go a step further: "like Obama", Wright is an ex-Muslim, and they speculate that they are working in tandem to secure their political ambitions as Islamic spies:

For if both men were Muslims trying to realize their political ambitions, then Wright's Church provided a valuable shelter from prying questions about both men's religious and political loyalties. It would serve to whitewash their shared Muslim past, a secret both men have every reason to conceal, now more than ever.

Now, I've never understood why the Islamo-phobes in our community see "ex-Muslim" as a bad thing (for my part, I couldn't care less if you're ex-anything, so long as you're progressive -- which is why I can support the writings of ex-Muslim atheists like The Apostate, and the political campaigns of ex-Christian Muslim Keith Ellison). But now, I think we have a clue. Islam, it is implied, represents corruption of blood. Obama, by virtue of his father, and Wright, by virtue of his young flirtation with Islam, do not have Limpieza de sangre, and thus are suspect.

It's a sickening trope, all the more so coming from fellow Jews. Unfortunately, to a far larger extent than I'd like the Obama campaign is really bringing out some of the worst in my community (despite the strong and vocal support Obama gets from many Jews, which should not be washed over).

Backlash Hypothesis

Kevin Drum flags some dangers ahead for Democrats if the refuse to nominate Obama...and Hillary.

In the former case, Jerome Karabel notes that political loyalties are solidified in one's 20s. Coincidentally, that age group represents Barack Obama's base. If they feel spurned at the end of the primary process, they not only could sit out the election, their view of the Democratic Party could be jaundiced for the rest of their lives.

In the latter case, Amanda Fortini says women are beginning to get restless -- not that Clinton is losing, but that people are denying the role sexism is playing in the campaign. The Clinton campaign awoke "sexism in America, long lying dormant, like some feral, tranquilized animal," but too many (in the immortal phrase of Ann Bartow) supposedly liberal doods shout down any woman who dares bring it up (see also, Ampersand). If their frustration boils over, they could stay home election night.

Drum thinks that ultimately, neither will play a big role in the general, as the prospect of a McCain Presidency draws everyone back to the polls. Color me unconvinced. The politically engaged always over-estimate how much "the other guy is scary as hell" serves as a motivator. I will say that I'm more worried short-term about women staying home or crossing over than I am about the youth vote (not because I don't think nominating Clinton would have an effect, but because I think that Obama has pushed their engagement to such heights that at worst they'd "recede" back to normal figures). But of course, I think that if Clinton gets the nod after coming in behind in the pledged delegates, Democrats will also watch the Black vote disintegrate before their very eyes, which probably would be even worse. And the long-term harms of passing over Obama that Karabel notes are a unique danger that I hadn't thought of before.

S-V-S

A few years back, I read an article by an anti-colonialist law professor, Makau Mutua, who indicted the prevailing Western conception of human rights as operating on an "S-V-S" model: Savage-Victim-Savior. Simply put, the Western imagination imputes upon the third world as a totality the status as savages and victims (and people can reside in both categories), who need to be "saved" by the (Christian?) West. It's old-school imperialism in (barely) new guise, and needs to be resisted.

A few years prior to that, I had read Elie Wiesel's Night. And I recall his prayers for bombs to fall on his concentration camp -- for even though it might mean his death, it also could lead to his salvation. The great (and all-too-rare) heroes of the Holocaust were, after all, the rescuers.

The interplay of these somewhat conflicting ideas is what makes so interesting this post by "The Apostate", an American of Pakistani birth, and a Muslim-turned-Atheist. She fled theocracy and her entire family, fearing that her own family would try to kill her. She looked to feminism as a source of strength, one that told her that her degradation was not justified, that there was another path.

But now, from many in the "third wave", she feels hostility and attack. Her critiques of Islam have gotten her labeled "racist" by people who have adopted the religion, even as it was her birth religion. Third wavers sneer that abortion is a white woman's concern. But for her, getting pregnant would have meant the end of her life: "when I got raped and my first fear was not AIDS (and this in a third world country) — it was pregnancy." They demand she look past her own life, her "lived experience" in a theocracy (her term, not mine) to see that Islam doesn't need reforming because "there’s nothing wrong with it to begin with."

And thus we have a problem. We in the west do have trouble humanizing those outside of Europe and America. And the failure of imagination can be brutal. Persons of progressive sway -- no matter what their other proclivities -- feel the pull of colonialist and racist past, and we are terrified of it. We do not want to re-incarnate the image of the savage, or the agency-less victim. So we back away.

But while we are busy with our fretful mutterings about whether any particular act of engagement is colonization, people are dying. Women are dying, men are dying, children are dying. Jews are dying, Muslims are dying, Christians are dying, Hindus are dying, Atheists are dying. The dead and the dying are all-too-uninterested in whether their savior has earned their bona fides as an anti-colonialist. Wiesel, I'm sure, would have been equally happy to have been rescued by Soviet bombs as allied ones. He, and they, just wonder why nobody will rescue them. Fear of the S(avage) and V(ictim) means no S(avior). There is a cost to waiting for moral purity, and it's not the impure who have to pay it.

Turning back to the abstract for a moment. As someone who identifies as a feminist (and more third-wave than second), and an anti-racist, and all the other affiliations of the post-modern progressive nexus, there is nothing more depressing to me than when oppressed people look upon these models, and see an adversary. Are met with hostility. As a Jew, I feel this daily. The language of feminism and anti-racism work has been an crucial tool in a too often hostile world. It provided the language to understand and vocalize the alienation I've always felt, and was an essential support as I moved from the relatively warm confines of suburban Maryland (where everyone is at least familiar with Judaism) to rural Minnesota (where I was an oddity and I couldn't count on people reflexively knowing the basic contours of what it means to be Jewish). And so, I am thankful to those theorists every day.

But at the same time, the language of the left is often deployed against my people. Anti-Semitism is not rampant, but it has a very noticeable presence and is too often tolerated. Durban 1 was an obvious example, but hardly an isolated one. When I see a thread on Israel or Jews on a feminist blog, I shouldn't feel dread in my gut. But I do. There is little pain like the betrayal of those who you've come to rely upon in your darkest hour. Though I doubt The Apostate would approve, I think of Job's raw cry to God: "Why do you hide your face from me; and treat me as an enemy?" (13:21)

In my own personal journey, I've fought this bitterly. I refuse to cede the ground of progressivism to those who would see me and mine destroyed, who roll the dice with my life and seem apathetic as to what the outcome will be. So, I aggressively deploy the language I've learned, that's sustained me, against those who would reify my oppression. The Apostate did likewise, appropriating and wielding the concepts of "erasing", "silencing" and "lived experience" to put together an extraordinarily powerful post. From the context, it's hard to tell if she is using them sarcastically. It'd be hard to blame her if she did, but I hope not. I hope that she sees value in those tools, and -- even if utilizing them against their normal merchants is ironic -- has found away for them to sustain her as well.

Via

The Decision Draws Nigh

Well, I've been being coy about the play out of the law school admissions tournament, but I feel like I can share a little now. Sharing point one: I'm going to law school, not grad school. Sharing point two: I've narrowed my decision down to two schools: Columbia, and Chicago. The decision is due at the start of May, so I figure if any of y'all have insight to share, now is the time.

I'll lay out the advantages of each place as best as I can figure. Ideally, I'd do this after I visit the schools, but I won't make it to Columbia until just a few days before the deadline, so by then this post would be too late. Anyway, here we go.

Columbia

* Faculty match! This is the big one for Columbia. I want to do CRT, and Columbia has both Patricia Williams and Kimberle Crenshaw (part-time, in the latter case). Chicago has -- well, I'm not sure they have anyone doing CRT specifically. The closest person I'd guess is Martha Nussbaum. She's awesome, don't get me wrong, but that's still a good hop, skip, and jump away from CRT. As I get more interested in pragmatism, Richard Posner intrigues me more and more, but I can't imagine he actually has time to meet with students (I don't know how he has time to eat).

* It's closer to home. I don't mind being in the mid-west, really, but I'm starting to weary of the long trips back and forth. I can take the train from NYC back to Washington. I love trains.

* Higher US News ranking. I don't really put much stock in that (particularly when we're talking about consensus top-10 schools), but there it is.

Chicago

* I want to be a law professor, and Chicago is known as a law professor training ground (to more of a degree than Columbia).

* It's a smaller school. I didn't really think about this until recently, but that could be an issue. After all, I attended a small liberal arts college. I've still never had a class with more than 30 people in it. I have no idea how I'll respond to a big, anonymous lecture course. Even if the difference is a 30 person intro class at Chicago versus 50 at Columbia, that could be significant for me.

* Relatedly, I've been told that Chicago's small size mixed with its lack of many CRTers could redound to my advantage, as I'll stand out and be more able to attract faculty attention. Even if I don't quite buy that the small CRT population is actually a good thing, I do think it may be true that I'll be more likely to be able to actually catch a glimpse of my professors beyond the podium at UC than at CU, and that'd be nice.

* It's not in New York. I don't have any strong feeling either way about Chicago. I do possess an irrational dislike of New York. I say irrational not because it's totally groundless -- I've been to NYC before -- but because it's not grounded in any particular bad experiences I've had there. I just find New York to be a bit grimy, a bit shadowed, and a bit gruff -- particularly for someone who's spent the last four years in the land of open friendliness that is Minnesota.

* Money: Chicago gave me an award, Columbia didn't. Again, not really a huge consideration, given that the size of the award is rather insignificant, and that for a variety of reasons I'm not all that worried about paying student loans, but for completeness sake, there it is.

***

So basically, Columbia's got faculty match, and Chicago has the size and the institutional identity as an academic training ground. I have an inclination, but that inclination has switched before (in fact, it's shifted from one to the other and back again several times now). We'll see how the visits go. Any advice would be appreciated.

Montana Purple?

Kos has gotten a hold of a poll which seems to indicate Montana is in play -- at least if Obama is running:

General Election, 4/6. Likely voters. MoE 4.5%

John McCain 48%
Barack Obama 43%

John McCain 56%
Hillary Clinton 36%

Now, normally I'd consider a poll like this akin to those ones which say Obama might lose Massachusetts in November -- just one of those quirky but utterly unfeasible things that pop up when you poll six months out of election day. But here, I actually see a there there. Democrats are experience a bit of a resurgence in the Big Sky state. Tester's upset Senate victory followed Brian Schweitzer's rise to the governor's mansion, where he has enjoyed a wildly popular reign in office. And Obama has shown real drawing power in the sparsely populated plains and rocky mountain region.

Ultimately, I don't think he'll win Montana, because to do so would require an investment of time and resources not worth its three electoral votes. But just the fact that it is even on the map shows how Democrats are expanding the playing field -- and exploiting a very favorable national climate.

Cause for Anger

Andrew Sullivan:

Sometimes I wonder if some white Republicans actually believe that black people in this country have no reason to feel any anger or alienation at times. I'm not talking about letting it consume you - just feeling it, dealing with it, managing it.

He then follows up with a moving account of how his own experience as a gay man makes it easier for him to understand Black anger and alienation -- along with the admission that, had he not been gay, he might have blindly adopted the same position as his Republican peers.

Lisa S. or L. Simpson?

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has an odd view of anonymity:

"In my opinion, the plan, the scheme was the problem for me personally," said the jury foreman, who requested anonymity in light of the judge's request that jurors not yet speak publicly.

I presume the foreman's identity was public knowledge -- certainly at least to the judge who gave the gag order in the first place.

The case he's taking about, incidentally, is interesting too -- sadly, it might be yet another case of a politicized prosecution by the Bush Justice Department.

Social Condemnation as a Legal Substitute

Out in New Mexico, there is a burgeoning controversy about a photography company who refused, on religious grounds, to photograph a gay commitment ceremony. The couple complained to the state's human rights commission, which found the company in violation of the state's anti-discrimination policy and ordered her to pay attorney's fees in the amount of over $6,000. Eugene Volokh, by contrast, argues that photography is a speech act, and the Commission's ruling violates the first amendment by compelling someone to engage in expression they find distasteful (akin to, say, forced salute of the flag in West Virginia v. Barnette).

The legal merits aren't what I want to focus on. Rather, it flows out of a sub-issue that sprang out of a commenter alleging that very few people "would (dare to) take the photographer's side here if she refused to photograph a mixed-race couple." Volokh responds:

I should hope that virtually all of those who support Elaine Huguenin's Free Speech Clause rights would support that hypothetical photographer's constitutional rights, too. I certainly would, just as I support the constitutional rights of many people whose views I condemn.

When someone is discriminated against, the harms of that act are twofold. First, they are denied whatever benefit or opportunity that was being putatively offered -- in this case, having this photographer take pictures of a wedding. Second, they are faced with the stark and bald assertion that they are -- from the perspective of the discriminator -- a second-class citizen, one whom is particularly unworthy of her association or services.

Both of these harms can be remedied by law or by society. Law remedies the first by mandating the performance of the service. It remedies the second by sending the message the political community does not acquiesce to the assertion of inferiority. Both of these roles are important functions of anti-discrimination law.

Of course, sometimes it is not appropriate for law to intervene. Perhaps (as might be the case in the New Mexico controversy), the discrimination is intimately connected to another important right or principle, which the state must also be respectful of. In that case, society can also provide a remedy for both of the harms of discrimination. For the first, the couple can simply find another photographer. And for the second, society's expression of outrage and dismay can also send the message that the discriminated-against party really is to be included on full and equal terms, and it is the discriminator who is the outlier.

Often times, this expression of outrage occurs in tandem with the assertion of a lack of legal jurisdiction. "I condemn what you say, but defend your right to say it," as the saying goes. Volokh also makes note of this, condemning the hypothetical racist photographer while still asserting he would defend it. The availability of this sort of social sanction is, I feel, one of the ways we rationalize the withholding of legal remedy to many victims of discrimination.

But, this assumes that social sanction is, in fact, available. And for many gay and lesbian Americans, it is not. They are in a position of extreme vulnerability compared to, say, mixed-race couples, who can count on public outrage if they are discriminated against. Hence, they are even more reliant on legal remedy than many other groups. But of course, the fact that they are relatively more marginalized (that the question of their public equality is more controversial) makes it far less likely that law actually will protect them.

I've already noted the existence of this double-bind -- that law only protects minority groups who have displayed some measure of political power -- in the context of gay Americans before. In a sense, it merely states the obvious: it sucks to be marginalized, and the more marginal you are, the suckier it is. But it is important to note the extra layer of vulnerability that certain groups face when they can't count on extra-legal statements of support and affirmation in the face of discrimination. When the response to discrimination is not "I condemn but I defend", but "I defend and they're damn right to do it, too," the harms of exclusion are amplified dramatically.

Soylent Bling

Here. Morbid and creepifying.

Powell for Obama

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell had some awfully nice things to say about Barack Obama, and labeled himself an "undecided voter." Steve Benen wonders if an endorsement might eventually come out of it.

I almost hope it doesn't. Not because I really hold a grudge against Powell for his role in the Iraq fiasco -- of all the characters in that particular farce, he does not rank among the more risible, and I believe he still has a valuable role to contribute in our public discourse.

No, it's because I can't imagine anything that will destroy Powell as a public figure more than this endorsement.

Sure, Democrats will probably trumpet it for awhile. But Republicans (never much to countenance this sort of "betrayal") will flay him alive, in two ways. First, they'll scapegoat him for the Iraq war. I doubt that one will stick. But second, they'll undoubtedly portray him as a "race man", someone who let's his skin color dictate his political opinions -- basically no better than a Klansman. And I wouldn't be surprised if the media let that narrative run a little, if in slightly less stark terms. It's already been surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly) difficult for folks to get their heads around the fact that Black people might want to vote for a Black candidate because they genuinely think he's the best person for the job, not out of mere race loyalty. When the subject is a high-profile defection like Powell, it'll be even harder to impress that point on the mainstream media. And this one, I fear, might hold together.

Daily Dose of Young

Well, I don't give Iris Marion Young to you daily. But if I did, you'd be smarter for it.

According to Young, "perspective" is derived from the fact that differentiated people, by virtue of their varied social position, have "have different experience, history, and social knowledge derived from that positioning." She conceptualizes perspective as a "starting point" for how we think about political affairs, but not an end -- it sets up our vantage point, but does not determine what we decide to look at or how we interpret what we see.

Here, Young explains why -- notwithstanding the fact that everyone, by virtue of their unique background and experiences, has a different perspective -- it makes sense to think about perspective in terms of group positioning. She also stresses that saying that people might share a perspective (or at least a similarly positioned one) is not the same thing as saying they will reach the same normative conclusions about what principles flow from that, or what their political interests are.

To be sure, each person has his or her own irreducible group history which gives him or her unique social knowledge and perspective. We must avoid, however, the sort of individualism that would conclude from this fact that any talk of structured social positions and group-defined social location is wrong, incoherent, or useless. It makes sense to say that non-professional working-class people have predictable vulnerabilities and opportunities because of their position in the occupational structure. The idea of perspective is meant to capture that sensibility of group-positioned experience without specifying unified content to what the perspective sees. The social positioning produced by relation to other structural positions and by the social processes that issue in unintended consequences only provide a background and perspective in terms of which particular social events and issues are interpreted; they do not make the interpretation. So we can well find different persons with a similar social perspective giving different interpretations of an issue. Perspective is an approach to looking at social events, which conditions but does not determine what one sees.

Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 138-39.

So, for example, all gay people in America (save Massachusetts) share a "position" in that none can marry the partner of their choice. That does not mean that they all share the same ideas of what moral principles should be brought to bear on that issue (what Young calls "opinions"), or what they imagine the effect or importance that reality has on their life prospects (what Young calls "interests"). Two gay people could start from their relatively similar perspective, and radically differ on what moral principles they apply to it, and/or what interests they imagine they have regarding gay marriage. But nonetheless, they operate from a different standpoint than straight people, who necessarily don't "see" the problem of marriage inequality in the same way (even if they adopt the same interests or opinions on the matter as individual gay people).

Perspective matters because it can bring agenda items to the democratic table that might otherwise go un- or under-noticed, or offer new ways of conceptualizing a problem that the dominant perspective may be less likely to see. To talk about needing to include the gay perspective, or the Black perspective, is not to say that we are committed to a particular conception of their interests or ideologies. Elsewhere in the book, Young cites the example of the Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper. Though its news stories deal with a wide array of topics, and its editorial pages host political opinions ranging from right-wing libertarianism to left-wing socialism, it still identifiably comes from an "African-American perspective." It adopts an outlook that operates from the vantage point of where African-Americans reside in our social hierarchy, but still recognizes that people from that position can have widely variable interests and opinions.

Because people experience many social problems and controversies in different ways, it is important to insure that relevant groups are represented in discussion of those issues, even if we (rightly) assume that not every member of that group will have the same idea of how to respond to these issues.

UPDATE: An excellent example I just thought of illustrating this is my good friend, Clarence Thomas. Like many Blacks, Thomas interacted with the institution of affirmative action. He shares the position of his fellow African-Americans who also have reaped whatever benefits and hindrances that are the upshot of that institution -- particularly, the feeling by some Whites that he is less qualified as a result of being a "beneficiary" of it. Now, as is clear, that can lead to a variety of opinions on the subject -- Thomas considers AA actively harmful and wishes to abolish it, many other Blacks believe the problem is the White prejudice against AA graduates (flowing out anti-Black prejudice generally), not the program itself. The perspective, in other words, clearly doesn't determine one's ultimate opinion. But even granting that, it would still be absurd to the extreme to say that we should debate the question of affirmative action without consulting/representing those whose social position has given them this specific perspective on the matter.

The Joys of Youth

One of the great things about being young is that every once in awhile, an older person who you respect will write an incredibly adorable post about how they just discovered some new-fangled technology, and find it amazing. There's little that tops the smug sense of superiority I feel in those moments. It's a feeling born of love, and only lasts until I realize that said older person still is wiser and more successful than me in all the substantive areas I care about. But it's still nice to feel like I'm winning a round in life.

Pushing and Shoving

What Clinton adviser Lanny Davis says:

I have tried to get over my unease surrounding Barack Obama's response to the sermons and writings of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. But the unanswered questions remain.

.... Now is the time to address these questions, not later.

Clearly Mr. Obama does not share the extremist views of Rev. Wright. He is a tolerant and honorable person. But that is not the issue. The questions remain: Why did he stay a member of the congregation? Why didn't he speak up earlier? And why did he reward Rev. Wright with a campaign position even after knowing of his comments?

What he means:

Our best chance for derailing Obama's nomination has started to fall out of the political spotlight. Quick, let's pretend there are still "questions" that remain "unanswered"!

What's really pathetic about this particular effort is what Davis says "triggered" this latest column. Davis claims that he was forced to write after he "read for the first time" these three excerpts from Wright's sermons:

- "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
-- Sept. 16, 2001 (the first Sunday after 9/11)

- "The government . . . wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, no. God damn America; that's in the bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human."
-- 2003

- "The United States of White America."
-- July 22, 2007

Does anybody in their right mind believe that Davis had never seen these excerpts? These are the claims that were at the center of the controversy. You cannot have heard of the connection between Rev. Wright and Obama without having heard about the "God damn America" speech. It strains credulity to the breaking point to believe that this is all really new data for Davis. And he adds nothing new to the conversation. The only motivation for this sort of article is to pretend that this story is still a story. Unfortunately for Clinton supporters, Obama has by all objective accounts done an excellent job defusing it. Trying to shove it back into the spotlight is a waste of everyone's time.

Sistani Sanctions Sadr

This ain't good news, ladies and gentleman. Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, far and away the most influential religious figure among Iraqi Shi'ites, is telling Sadr not to disband his militia prior to the upcoming elections. Even if, as Publius says, this isn't Sistani "siding" with Sadr, it's still hardly a data point in favor of current American strategy.

I've said for quite some time that Sistani may well be the key to the game for America in Iraq. If that's so, we're beginning to lose, badly.

The Politics of The Olympics

Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber has an interesting post up about the growing political saliency of the Olympic Games, as demonstrated by the increased murmurings that Western leaders ought to boycott -- at the least -- the opening ceremonies of the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

Of course, it's not as if the Olympics were previously insulated from political machinations, as the dueling boycotts of the 1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles Games demonstrated. But, Farrell argues, the dynamic of where the pressure is coming from has changed significantly:

The dynamic driving the Beijing Olympics seems to me to be rather different; what we are seeing is that the politics of boycott is being driven by mass-publics, and most recently by protestors, rather than by political leaders. In the absence of the public unrest that has culminated in the recent protests in Paris, I doubt very much that Western political leaders would be muttering about not showing at the opening ceremonies – the geopolitical stakes of market access etc are likely more important to them than the fate of Tibetans. But given the widespread public reaction in the West, even leaders like Gordon Brown, who obviously want very much to attend, are having to insulate themselves from public pressures by taking other actions liable to annoy China (such as meeting with the Dalai Lama). In short, I think we are seeing how public opinion and organized cross-national opposition can create significant constraints on the ability of leaders to respond to what they see as the geostrategic necessity of keeping China happy. This is, as best as I am aware, a new phase in the development of the Olympics.

In other words, the Olympics offer a new avenue for grass-roots public anger to manifest itself in actual pressure on global leaders. This is because the Olympics are a high profile example of international recognition and engagement, and one that (between the presence of hordes of news media, athletes with personal agendas that don't map on to diplomatic niceties, and even the easily protested torch-run) offers a nearly unparalleled opportunity for media-friendly protests.

On the actual merits of boycotting the opening ceremonies itself, see Steve Clemons versus Daniel Drezner.

Creativity in Advertising

Here's an ad for Steve Novick, running for the Democratic Senate nomination in Oregon.



Fantastic ad, no? I do like how it plays off his disability in a positive way. (Novick was born without a left hand, among other problems, and stands only 4'9").

He's a dark-horse candidate running against State House Speaker Jeff Merkley, but he's actually flashed an early lead in the polls.

Now, 40% are undecided in the primary battle, and Merkley hasn't hit the airwaves yet. Merkley is also the far more experienced politician compared to Novick. But the persistent murmurs I've heard about Merkley are that his resume is better than his will to win. We'll see if he can close the gap, but I have to say, Novick's ad is one of the best I've seen all season, and exhibits the sort of innovation and risk-taking that I think will serve him well if he makes it to the general.

The Much Maligned Warren G. Harding

President Warren G. Harding is not exactly the most beloved of American historical figures. I wouldn't say he's reviled either -- more thought of as pathetic. Former Treasury Secretary William McAdoo stated:

"His speeches left the impression of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork."

I believe (though I cannot find it) that another contemporary once described him as "a good, decent man who should be lieutenant governor of Rhode Island." That might have referred to someone else -- but sentiment seems accurate enough.

Harding's stated sins are generally that a) he was surrounded by utterly corrupt advisers (though nobody claimed Harding himself was), b) he was politically mediocre, and c) he was an intellectual lightweight. But, while not exactly calling him a world-beater, Ilya Somin makes the case that Harding might be one of our most under-rated Presidents.

Harding made a well-known speech advocating full legal equality for southern blacks in 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama. As W.E.B. DuBois pointed out at the time, Harding went farther in advocating equal rights for blacks than any other post-Reconstruction Republican president (the Democrats, at that time the party of southern whites, were even worse). Indeed, no president went as far as Harding in advocating equal rights for southern blacks for several decades thereafter. Harding also lobbied hard for a federal anti-lynching bill to curb the rampant lynching of blacks by whites in the South - again, the first post-Reconstruction president to do so (the bill passed the House, but died in the Senate due to the threat of Democratic filibusters). As DuBois pointed out in the linked article, Harding was not wholly free of the racism common among whites at the time. But he was a lot better than the vast majority of his contemporaries.

Nor were these Harding's only positive aspects. As Gene Healy discusses in his interesting recent book, The Cult of the Presidency, Harding is also notable for reversing the severe violations of civil and economic liberties that had proliferated under his predecessor Woodrow Wilson. It's easy to belittle Harding's campaign slogan - "Return to Normalcy." But Harding's notion of "normalcy" included an end to the imprisonment of political dissenters (such as Wilson's notorious "Palmer Raids"), abolition of wage and price controls, and the reversal of Wilson's numerous illegal seizures of private property. As David Bernstein and I briefly discuss in this article, Wilson's administration was also highly racist and segregationist even by the standards of the day; here too, Harding was a sharp contrast.

All fair points, and worth considering. I particularly was unaware about his efforts on behalf of racial equality.

So let's have a cheer for President Harding: he really wasn't as awful as everyone makes him out to be!

Where's Wallace?

Dave Kopel writes on activities of another one of Barack Obama's spiritual mentors, the (White) Catholic priest Michael Pfleger. Though noting that Pfleger has done some good works (on racial profiling, Darfur, and opposing abusive rap lyrics), Kopel focuses primarily on Pfleger's aggressive anti-gun pose. It culminates in his protest of "Chuck's Gun Store", the closest gun store to Chicago (there are no gun outlets in the city itself). Kopel writes:

Yet the Reverends Michael Pfleger and Jesse Jackson have been organized large crowds to repeatedly picket Chuck's Gun Shop. On June 23, 2007, Revs. Jackson and Pfleger were arrested for criminally obstructing the entrance to the store. The charges were eventually dropped, just as Governor George Wallace never was criminally punished for standing in a doorway to obstruct the exercise of constitutional rights. (The comparison is a little unfair, since Wallace eventually stood aside, whereas Jackson and Pfleger had to be physically removed by the police.)

Okay, hold it. I'm not an anti-gun zealot, and from Kopel's description it sounds like Chuck's is behaving like a good citizen in terms of training its employees so that it's guns do not get into the wrong hands (there could be more information, of course, that Kopel is not telling us). That being said -- worse than George Wallace? I realize that the sin qua non of Kopel's existence is protecting gun rights. But come on, let's keep our heads on our shoulders, yes?

Also, Kopel cites Pfleger as promising to "snuff out" the owner of the store. Pfleger denies that he was advocating violence, and instead meant only to reveal where the owner lived. Now, I'm not a fan of that sort of intimidation either, and as Kopel notes, "snuff out" actually is primarily slang for "to kill." But I'm guessing that Pfleger was mixing it up with "sniff out", which would mean exactly what he said he meant. Again, only a small consolation, because I think trying to reveal a political opponent's home address is pretty threatening behavior, but relevant data nonetheless.

Something Corporate

Jonathan Adler complains that Starbucks allows you to personalize their gift cards so they say "People not Profits" or "Si Se Puede," but not "Laissez Faire." This is, of course, ironic, since it is (relatively) laissez faire economics that allow Starbucks its prosperity in the first place.

But doesn't Adler realize that the irony is precisely the reason for the prohibition? Starbucks realizes that part of its continued health as a coffee chain business is maintaining its image as hip and humane, and conversely, not some soulless MNC. "Starbucks -- Laissez Faire" cuts against the image they're trying to project, so they restrict it. All perfectly within their rights and totally rational in the pursuit of profit.

Mr. Washington

Attention, law/grad schools! If you really want me to attend, this is an excellent idea. The amount of money is almost immaterial -- it's the performance that counts:

a friend in the office suggested we lay in a supply of thin black briefcases for grad and faculty recruitment purposes. we could cash out financial offers or start-up funds in one dollar bills, secure them in 50-note currency straps, and pack them into a stylish attaché case. if a recruit starts to waver, we'd pop it open dramatically, saying, perhaps mr. washington and his friends might change your mind. we don't have huge funds to throw around, but we can usually chip in fifty for gas.

Only grad students, of course, could be wowed by a brief case full of singles.